


Tied with a bow

by JaqofSpades



Category: Revolution (TV)
Genre: 54 prompts in 54 days, Blood Play, F/M, non-con touching and dubious consent rather than rape
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-03
Updated: 2015-01-29
Packaged: 2018-02-15 23:29:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 11
Words: 7,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2247429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaqofSpades/pseuds/JaqofSpades
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Miles Matheson, commanding general of the Monroe Militia, goes looking for his family, and this time it's not Danny on the end of that crossbow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Tied with a bow

**Author's Note:**

> Uh, not sure what I'm doing with this one, because it's veering towards the dark. May or may not come back to it.

“I found them,” Miles says, his voice so blank that Bass swings around to stare. He's not sure which “them” Miles has found, but he does know he's not going to like what's coming next. He can hear the cold speculation in his brother's voice, just waiting to see how Bass is going to react.

Fine then, he thinks. He'd hoped, today, they might be able to get over whatever this is that has sprung up between them since the bombing. He'd sent Nora away for her own good, but Miles just can't see that, and it's been the fucking Cold War ever since. As of this morning, he's officially too old for this bullshit, Bass thinks venomously. He just wants to get drunk with his best friend, maybe get laid if there's a whore in this city who hasn't bored him yet. 

“Remind me who you were looking for, again,” he says, almost hoping Miles will go away and leave him in peace. Maybe if he can manage to stop caring … 

“My family,” Miles says harshly, and Bass closes his eyes in apology. (He can't let this show, can't let Miles know how much it hurts to be the only one who needs like this. Miles is his family. His only family.) 

“Of course, Miles. Of course. And?”

“Little place called Sylvania Estates. Wisconsin. Reckon they knew we were here, but …” his hands twist upwards in a moment of pure frustration, and Bass bleeds for him. “They're all good. Settled.”

“That's wonderful news, Miles. We'll – throw 'em a party or something! Bring 'em in and show 'em how things are done in the Capital,” Bass grins, waiting for Miles to look happy. Or something. Look something, Miles, he begs silently.

The slow, vicious smirk that crosses the General's face comes as a shock, though.

“Oh, they'll turn up eventually,” he grins, eyes as flat as a rattlesnake. “Might have taken something.”

Fuck. That's it. What he's been waiting for. What the fuck has his brother done this time?

“Go look in your office, Bass.”

He crosses the room more quickly than is seemly for the President of the Republic. What could Ben and Rachel have that …. Oh. Jesus.

Furious blue eyes boil him alive from a face that's more arresting than beautiful. High cheekbones, over a wide, lush mouth – she'll grow into it, two, three years tops. She's whipcord lean, but the way her hands are tied behind her back threatens to spill small, round breasts right out of whatever passes for underwear in the provinces.

He's suddenly, undeniably hard, and knows he won't be wasting time with a whore tonight.

“My niece, Charlotte Matheson,” Miles announces from his spot beside the door, eyes cold as they flick over his own flesh and blood, trussed like a turkey for Thanksgiving. “Doesn't like militia, apparently. Put an arrow into one of my boys.”  


“So you ….?”

“Had to make an example of her, family or no family, so I threw her in the cart. Figured she could cool off downstairs for a bit, but then I remembered our plan. Married by 40, right?”

Bass is wondering when Miles forgot exactly how old they are – he's turning 42, not 40 - when it hits him. His mouth drops open and Miles' smirks at the perfect gotcha.

“Happy Birthday, brother. She's a bit feral, but think of all of the fun we'll have breaking her in.”

*

prompt: birthday


	2. Her false god

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so apparently this IS continuing. Looking darker by the moment, so I hope y'all meant it when you yelled for more :D

She remembers her uncle from before the Blackout. Impossibly tall, flashing her a toothy grin when no one was watching, his face falling back into somber lines when Mom or Dad turned their way. Driving fast in a red car, her champion at the state fair, his steely eye steady on the prize, piling her arms high with cotton candy and plush toys and icecream that dripped sticky over black leather seats.

He'd reached over to catch her once, when she'd leaned out too far to look down from their carriage at the top of the ferris wheel, sugar and five-year-old exuberance no match for those huge hands, those long arms that wrapped around her to keep her safe.

His hands are still huge, but they scrape over her skin now, rough with calluses from too much time gripping a sword. He'd been a soldier then, too, but not like this, Charlie knows. Never like this.

The Butcher, they called him. The most reviled man in the country. The rebels struggled, sometimes, turning people against President Monroe, him of the soft voice and seductive reason. He was the shining golden figurehead to the Butcher's devil black – he didn't have to kill, her friends sneered. He had Matheson to do it for him.

It had always hurt, hearing her name hissed like that, so much venom dripping from those familiar syllables. Coincidence, she'd been told. Wasn't exactly an uncommon name. And then the militia marches into the village, and there's a demon at their head, and she knows him in her bones. 

"Hey Ben,” he'd said, and her father's face had twisted with despair, and love. “Hello, Miles,” he'd replied, and she knew. She had been lied to – and lying – her whole life. 

She'd always thought her Dad was a coward, for wanting nothing to do with the rebels. So many reasons for refusing to take a stand, but none of them the truth. General Matheson was her uncle Miles, her hero, him of the warm arms and no rules and the wicked grin.

Her false God.

She looses the arrow with no conscious thought, her heart stopping when it thumps into the soldier to his left. He pins her down himself, and there's no grin, no indulgence, just fury.

Her Dad is begging, Mom is glaring daggers and Danny spiralling down into an attack as they move out, Charlie chained up in the back of the wagon, just another prisoner of the Monroe Republic. Except … 

He rides alongside the wagon, and when they come with food or water, the soldiers stand rigid and correct. No one touches her, and she knows that wouldn't be the case if she was anyone else. She tells herself she hates it, the special treatment.

But when he calls the medic over to check out her chafed wrists, she's stupid enough to thank him. Matheson's eyes meet hers, and something flashes deep in those black pools, something that reminds her of her uncle, until it's banished by something else all too familiar.

“Can't have you showing up in Philly all scabbed and bleeding, can we?” he says, picking up her wrist to inspect the damage. One lazy finger strokes the sensitive skin in a way that makes her want to blush, but it's the way that he's watching her that makes her uneasy, hot in her skin. He's her uncle, he wouldn't, she had to be imagining it…

She's so perturbed by the lust in his eyes that she nearly misses their black calculation. He brings that mouth, that wicked grin, so close to her ear that her skin prickles with fear or menace or something else completely unrelated to the spicy, hot scent of him looming over her. Then he whispers her fate, not even bothering to disguise his excitement at the evil he's about to perpetrate.

“Gonna get you clean, all tarted up, then give you to the President. What a birthday present you'll make.”

His tongue flicks out then, a mistake perhaps, certainly not the lightning fast taste of her ear that it feels like. A shiver races through her even as her brain chants no, no, no, but he's not finished. 

“Maybe he'll let me help unwrap you.”


	3. The lash

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> written for 54 prompts in 54 days over at the nbc_revolution comm on LJ. This one actually slides in under wordcount!

Arousal twists in his gut, and he lashes himself with it.

Pervert. Sicko. Paedophile, even. The girl is still a child.

His niece, he reminds himself. Don't forget that, you perverted fuck. His niece, Ben's daughter, is still a child, and he's going to give her to Bass to be the final link in a chain of bad, bad decisions. The link that will lock them together for life. 

He has made his bed, now Charlie's gonna have to lie in it.

He forces himself to think of her sprawled in the Presidential bed, Bass slavering between her thighs. He'll make it good for her, he knows, push her over the edge long before he even gets inside. He's seen it often enough, the way they writhe for him, and beg and clutch at his cock, whores and innocent society girls alike. 

She's neither of those, Ben's Charlie. General Matheson, she'd mouthed, horror all over her face, and then her eyes had gone cold and flat, and she'd fired. Poor Thompson. 

They'd grabbed her straight away, but she'd been defiant, magnificent, staring straight back at the man who'd levelled Baltimore, and starved out Annapolis, and fired every village that had ever sheltered rebels. Unflinching blue eyes on his, and he'd felt the chains loop around him, strangling the last part of him that's still a man, locking him onto this path.

Because he knows exactly who she is, and who she needs to become. It's just his fucking bad luck that the one Matheson Bass really needs is barely 17 years old, a warrior princess with the shimmering blue eyes of the niece he'd once adored.

And it's her bad luck that her uncle sold his soul to this farce of a life a decade ago, and is so black, so rotten, that he clings to the lust, wallows in it, and strokes it hot.

(It's almost a relief, having something so tangible to hate himself for.)

*

(prompt: chains)


	4. The fool's mate

He doesn't know where to look. The girl, struggling against her bonds, threatening to upend the chair with her determined fury. Miles, watching him watch her, and waiting for him to react.

Bass lets his eyes drift past her, then strolls to the window as if the view is vastly more interesting. It's not, of course. The square outside is bare and quiet in the twilight, the pattern on the paving reminding him of a chessboard. This piece, the pawn. That piece, the knight.

She could be his queen.

It blindsides him, how much he wants that. Not just her - she's a filthy, angry, surprisingly foul-mouthed teenager, no matter how edible her bouncy little tits are – but the idea of her. Charlotte Matheson Monroe. Their families, united.

They'd dreamed it up years ago, drunk in the ruins of a newly-captured city.

“Here's to the Monroe Republic,” Miles had saluted, whiskey sloshing out of his glass.

“Should be Matheson-Monroe,” he remembers grumbling. “All your damn idea. Half yours, brother.”

Miles had shoulder checked him in the same way he did when they were eight, and twelve, and twenty one. _Doesn't matter, brother. We're together._

“Shame you don't have a sister I could marry. Then our kids would be Matheson-Monroe - bet you'd let me call it that then,” he had joked. 

“Ben's got a daughter. She'll grow up soon enough,” Miles had smirked across the top of his glass, making Bass splutter into his whiskey.

“Little Charlotte? Kid calls me Uncle Bass, Miles. That's sick,” he had scoffed, but Miles had just waggled his eyebrows and said something about giving her ten years. 

And he feels the fool now, knowing that they've been teetering on the brink of something for months. The good money had been on a coup, his mad, bad general finally ready for his turn in the top chair. Bass hadn't listened, exactly, but he'd made a point of getting out to see the troops more. Of promoting more officers. Of having a few direct lines of communication in place.

But the money was wrong, and he curses himself for every thinking otherwise because this is Miles, who loves power, but not to wield or tend. He loves taking it, and pulling the strings from behind the curtain, and outplaying his opponents. And the minute Bass had dared to think of him that way, he'd slammed the counter for game on.

He'd loved it once, their little competitions. But this time, Bass had crafted Miles the very stick to beat him with. This man, his lifelong best friend, knew his every weakness, from the extra spoon of sugar in his morning coffee, to the exact degree of kink he preferred in the bedroom. Knew his every moral limit, and how to drive him right past them.

Bass looks back at the girl – Charlotte, dammit, little Charlotte – and tries to see her as the ugly, custom-built trap she is. But Miles has tied her up with the sort of knotwork that makes his cock throb. He'd put her straight in front of the desk he liked to bend his whores over, and left her fierce and a little bit bloody, the way the girls had been back when they'd never thought to resort to whores. Had he touched her? Was he suggesting they _share_ her, the way they had Nora that insane, glorious summer before things went sour?

Matheson-Monroe, his heart taunts. Matheson-Monroe. 

He'd checkmated himself long ago.

*

(prompt: fool)


	5. Wild thing

“Charlotte Matheson,” the President drawls, and something ripples up her spine. His husky voice transforms her name into something more than a collection of random syllables – she's a surprise, yes, but one that delights and amazes him. He circles her slowly, wary, as if she's a rare, dangerous beast, and Charlie wants to rend him with her claws and tear him to pieces with her teeth, but instead she stops struggling, takes a deep breath, and lifts her chin to meet his gaze.

A mistake, she finds a heartbeat later. His eyes blaze so blue they burn, and when his lips twitch into an amused looking smirk, he's so beautiful she feels something shift, deep inside. She clutches to her principles and thinks “murderer” and yet it still claims her, the lust rising in a slow and slippery tide. She's horrified, revolted by herself, but outrage can't keep her panties dry. She drags her eyes away, desperate to save herself, and he takes it as an end to her defiance.

“Excellent. You've decided to cooperate. It's good to see you again, Charlotte,” he says. Her brain stumbles over _again_ and her body insists she'd never forget him, but they've both got bigger things to worry about as President Monroe steps closer and draws the dagger from his belt. Her heart stills a little, then stutters back into life as he crouches in front of her to slice through the ropes tying her ankles to the chair. But there's no excuse for the way it slams into overdrive when he straightens a little, then pauses, their faces just inches apart. 

“Promise me you'll behave and I'll do your hands too,” he offers, and she can only nod, proximity rendering her voiceless. She'd been hoping he'd need to stand behind her to do it; instead he leans over her shoulder, sliding his knife in behind the knots, supporting himself with a knee up on the chair next to her, his muscled thigh pressing into the side of her body as he works.

“Your uncle does love his pretty knots,” he purrs somewhere over her head, and suddenly, the pressure releases. She's rubbing feeling back into her hands when he puts his lips next to her ear in a perfectly audible whisper: “just be thankful he wanted me to see these pretty little tits, or you'd have been covered in rope neck to knees. And he thinks _I'm_ the bondage freak.”

He offers his hand to help her stand up, and when her agonisingly numb feet protest, throws an arm around her shoulders to keep her from falling.

“I'm so sorry, Charlotte,” he grates, and glares at General Matheson, fury near tangible. “Don't just stand there, you fucking dick. Get the medic up here and tell Smith to start filling the bath.” 

Matheson sneers back.

“Nothing a medic can do – had her wrists looked at this morning. She's welcome to my bath, though.”

Something in the way she flinches leaves Monroe rigid.

“Generous of you to offer, Miles, but mine is closer. Dinner's at eight,” the President barks in obvious dismissal, already steering her towards a pair of double doors set at the far end of the room.

She leans into him without thinking about it, so full of relief at no longer having to deal with her looming carrion-crow of an uncle. He pats her shoulder, and when their eyes meet, she has to remind herself that even cut free of her bonds, she is still a prisoner here. 

His prisoner.

Enemy. Captor. Tyrant, locking her tight in his gilded cage. So be it. If he wants to pet her like a house cat and forget she has claws, more fool him. She'll be waiting for the best time to pounce.

*

prompt: bonds


	6. Sacrifice

His office, he explains, opens into a private library, which has another set of double doors leading to his sitting room, which opens onto his bedroom. There, in between the roaring fire and the huge, canopied bed, her bath is waiting.

Her hair practically stands on end, every sense jangling with how dangerous this is. He notices, of course, and rushes to reassure her.

“You'll have complete privacy here. The guards will be right outside the door, and I'll tell them no one comes in except Mrs Smith. Just knock if you need anything, and they'll send her in. Here – let me light the candles for you.”

He takes the taper and lights the four tall candles set on candelabra around the bath. She sniffs at the waste of it, given the abundant light from the crackling fire, but there's soap too, she realises with a jolt of excitement, and fine cloths to wash her body. He's not a man to be denied his luxuries. 

Not a man to deny his appetites, something ancient and feral hisses.

“Mrs Smith will bring you some clothes shortly – I was hoping you might join me to celebrate my birthday? We eat at eight,” he says, nodding towards the clock on the mantlepiece. A quick bath, then, she sighs.

Or …. maybe not.

She's had it refilled three times by the time he comes looking for her. Her skin is dark rose even in the room's orange glow, buffed and polished by a succession of accessories she's sure no man has ever used. Her hair, clean at last, is a tumble of different coloured honeys, and she's rubbing the last of the soap over her skin.

Up her legs, as he strides through the door and almost screeches to a halt. Over her belly as he looks, and looks again, and starts to move once more. Charlie's heart starts to deafen her as he comes to stand over her, but she's committed to this plan, and there's nothing left but to follow through. She wanted him distracted, and careless, and he certainly hasn't looked at anything else in the room yet.

She arches her back a little and glides the soap over her breasts. The circles are large at first, but as his eyes darken, and her skin starts to throb, they become smaller. Encroach on her areolas. Slick over her nipples.

Only … she hadn't expected it to feel so good.

Hadn't realised he would be quite so enthralled, no matter what he might have said earlier. Hadn't expected the bulge that suddenly tents the front of his trousers, and the unashamed way he strokes it, mere inches from her face. Hadn't been prepared for him to drop to his knees, and take the soap from her, and set it aside.

He drops a kiss on her bare shoulder, and her entire body clenches at the rush of want. She wants him to scoop her up and toss her in that bed, she realises, and it's got absolutely nothing to do with the long, thin blade she had ripped free of the lining of her ratty jacket.

“Are you trying to seduce me, Charlotte?”

“It is your birthday.”

“True, but I've never really been into virgin sacrifice.”

She's suddenly, excruciatingly, mortified, bolting upright to cover herself, moving so quickly that water sloshes out of the tub and over the sleeves of his uniform. He frowns, and gives her his back, undoing the buttons quickly and efficiently, leaving him momentarily bare-chested in the candlelight. Not for long, though – he plucks another from the cupboard and dons it quickly, puncturing her hopes that he might, he could just ...

“We've waited dessert on you, Charlie, so get dressed,” he growls. “And for the record? It's not the virgin part I have a problem with.” 

*

prompt: candles


	7. The chill of defeat

Mrs Smith – who seemed quite sweet for all that she works for an evil dictator – had laid three dresses on the bed, complete with matching lingerie and heels. Charlie chose the black dress out os spite, then searched fruitlessly for the black bra.

It wasn't until she picked up the pile of silk she realised why she hadn't been able to find it. What she had thought was a sash was the long, trailing ends that would tie behind her neck, and fall away to nothing, leaving her back completely bare. Going in there braless seemed inadvisable after being accused of trying to sacrifice her virginity to seduce him.

But the red would seem too much of a statement, and she was damned if she was wearing the white, so backless and braless it would have to be.

President Monroe and General Matheson are the only people still sitting at the table when she's finally escorted in. There had been others in attendance, but their plates are cleared now, with only three covered bowls, and a single glass of white wine left on the table.

The men, she notes, have already moved on to whiskey.

“Charlotte,” the President greets her from his position at the end of the table, and she knows it's a deliberate slight when he doesn't stand. It's General Matheson who unfolds his long frame and moves around to the opposite side of the table to pull her chair out.

“Usually we'd finish with birthday cake, but Bass decided on something different this year,” he says, eyes interrogating her face. “Ladies first.”

She lifts the lift on the bowl, frowning when she finds it icily cold. Chilled, somehow, she realises, frowning down at the brown-flecked white mass already starting to melt in the bowl. Cookie dough icecream, she gasps, her finger already scooping a taste into her mouth.

The sweet, gooey crunch of it has her staring blindly into a melee of memories, taste and sound and the stickiness between her fingers as she kicks her feet under the bench. She doesn't want to associate those precious memories with this man. Uncle Miles is hers, and hers alone.

She pushes it away.

“Why cut off your nose to spite your face,” the President coos from his spot next to her, and leans over to load up her spoon.

“Here,” he says, and lifts it to her lips, waiting.

She slaps his hand away, but he's stronger than she realised and it merely results in the icecream catapulting towards her, splatting wetly just below her collar bone.

“I had six cooks working for the past four hours to make that icecream,” Monroe says coldly. “I'll be damned if I watch it go to waste.”

Cookie dough surprise is still sticky, still gooey, she discovers as the heat of her skin sends a small river of icecream gushing down over the silk. She pats ineffectually at it with her fingers, and only succeeds in making more of a mess.

“I'll fetch a dishtowel,” Matheson offers and strides away from the table, but Monroe calls him back. 

“No need,” he smirks, and scoops her out of her seat to deposit her squarely in his lap, mouth already fastening over the sweet mess on her neck. 

Charlie freezes as Monroe's tongue works its way around the gooey sweetness, lapping and licking until she's sure he's sucked the very marrow from her bones. And then he chases the drips that have ruined her dress, mouth hot and wet on the silk of her dress, round the curve of her breast, into her cleavage. Charlie starts to hyperventilate.

Matheson is moving closer, eyes fixed on them, black as pitch. 

“Bass,” he warns, but there's a plea in it, too.

“Eat your icecream, Miles,” the President orders. “Maybe when you're finished I'll let you eat mine.”

Charlie's eyes flicker open long enough to see the chagrin on her uncle's face. He's been told to sit and watch, she realises, and it shouldn't feel like a victory. It should still feel … wrong.

But then something cold lands full on her nipple – Miles, not just watching, she realises – and something clatters on the table behind her but the President's hot, hot mouth is lapping and sucking and laving the tortured bud through silk so wet it may as well be bare skin. Might even be better than bare skin, Charlie moans, and surrenders to the urge to rub herself against the hardness underneath her. 

“Thought you said she was just a child,” she hears her uncle sneer, but this time doesn't bother to open her eyes. He's immaterial – it's just her, and Monroe, and the vast, spiralling sensation that is crowding out every part of her that knows better.

He stops, and her body begs him to keep going, even as her mind grabs at the respite. 

“She is. We signed it into law ourselves, brother. Age of consent is 18, whether it's drinking, fighting or fucking. This is … a lesson. What happens to naughty little girls who think they can seduce the President.”

He nods at the table then, and Charlie twists to follow his gaze to the automatic pistol sitting right in the middle of the table. It can't be loaded, she tells herself. He wouldn't be so stupid. Couldn't be so sure of himself. (She couldn't have missed that. Wouldn't have. Surely. It can't have been there for long.)

“Bring in our final guests,” he bellows, and two guards march in a pair of struggling prisoners. Charlie's heart flies into her mouth as she recognises their faces – Maggie, the leader of their local cell of the resistance, and her lieutenant, Jonah.

“How do you feel, Charlotte? To know you could have saved their lives?” Monroe asks coldly, and she's still thinking _but they're not dead?_ when he grabs the pistol and shoots them both, two neat little holes in two foreheads, an object lesson, purely for her.

*

prompt: icecream


	8. Little deaths

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, even though 54 prompts in 54 days is now over, I've decided to finish out the table. So more bitsy bits of fic.

He can't help but mourn a little as revulsion and outrage chase away the flush of arousal from her exquisitely open face. It was necessary, of course, but he hadn't been prepared for how much this lesson would hurt, his rampant cock a mere annoyance next to the ache of seeing her desire for him so brutally snuffed out. 

She flings herself backwards, practically scrambling onto the table in her need to escape from him. He lets her go, lets her cross to the bodies and flutter ineffectually over them, not quite able to check for lifesigns or close their eyes like a hardened warrior would. Miles sidles over to do it instead, and she flies at him, alight with fury.

“He didn't kill them, Charlotte. I did,” Bass intercedes just as Miles is about to lose his patience with her attempts to scratch and bite him. “Your uncle is just doing what needs to be done – what I've ordered him to do.”

Miles scowls furiously and he knows the barb has sunk deep. There never used to be orders between them – they made their plans together, and built their empire on unspoken agreements that didn't need to be voiced. Now there are orders,and communiques, and Bass sometimes skipping right over his General to talk directly to soldiers further down the chain of command.

Not in this, though.

It had been Miles who intercepted the whispers about a rebel cadre bold enough to follow one of their own all the way to Philadelphia. It was Miles who interrogated the pretty English woman, unwilling to let Strausser and his knife anywhere near such a pretty face. It had been Miles who had nearly slit brave Maggie's throat when her snivelling lieutenant had vomited out every last Rebel plan, including the one they'd blundered straight into the middle of.

“She doesn't know,” Maggie had said, unrepetant. “We just knew that you were Ben Matheson's brother, and that she might be useful, one day. Leverage,” she had explained, cut-glass accent underscoring the cynicism of it all.

“Leverage with a set of blow job lips and an ass like a peach. What, you thought all she'd need was a few instructions on how to use 'em?” 

Bass had force himself to unclench his fists, unsure whether he wanted to deck his brother for the grottiness of the truth, or for daring to notice in the first place. The rebel commander had no such qualms, one aristocratic eyebrow shooting up as she chilled the room with the depths of her disdain.

“You're her uncle, General Matheson. You're not supposed to looking at her lips or her arse,” the statuesque blonde said, and never had Bass been so tempted to keep an enemy alive. 

Miles had just laughed, though.

“That's the thing, sweetheart. I'm the Butcher. The Prince of Darkness. Uh – lets see. Satan's fucktoy, that's a good one. Heard somebody call me the Terminator once, but I'm thinking they don't remember the film right. Miles Matheson. That seems to scare the shit out of people just fine. And you think I'm gonna keep my hands off a pretty girl just because she's my brother's kid? Why the hell should I do that?” 

It erupted from somewhere deep in his belly, as irresistible and uncontrollable as any other bodily function. “Because she's mine,” Bass growled, teeth bared, his tactical brain outweighed by a million years of shrieking instinct.

It was a mistake, to let them know that. The rebels, as much as Miles. Caring about someone, needing her like that, left him vulnerable. Left him no choice.

He'd stamped their death warrants, then and there. The farce to come was merely a eulogy. Three more victims of his lack of self control.

Even if he hadn't quite figured out what to do with Miles yet.

*

prompt: eulogy


	9. To the victor the spoils

Miles blinks, and blinks again as the smell of cordite lingers heavy in the room, and the pool of blood grows steadily larger. Yowza. He hadn't expected that.

It's been a long time since Bass had been able to surprise him, but he's done it twice in two days now. First, his reluctance to just take the girl and be damned along with him, and now this. The blood all over the floor was easily dealt with, but the fallout, not so much.

Miles yells for a cleanup crew as he turns over the implications of what Bass has done. It'll get back to the rebels, soon enough, and they'll find a way to blame him, so nothing new there. But why the big turnaround? It had always been Bass who had argued for leniency and understanding, insisting that was the only way to stamp out all their ridiculous quibbles. Seeing him put a bullet in two inoffensive regional troublemakers was … troubling. 

Nothing to do with their rebel problem, his instincts tell him, and everything to do with the people in the room at the time. He'd said something about it being a lesson for Charlie, and he's got to figure there's another message in there too. A warning, perhaps, aimed right between his eyes. 

“She's mine,” Bass had snarled during the interrogation, and Miles had taken it as a victory, the one that would consolidate his control of the Republic. Prematurely, it seemed. Perhaps Bass wasn't the love-sotted fool he remembered, so desperate for family and belonging that he was willing to do anything to get it. Or maybe he had seen the trap, and decided to spring it.

Good play, Miles has to allow, if that's what had actually happened. Fucked if he knows. First Bass had tried to pretend he didn't want the girl, then he'd practically got her off in the middle of dinner. The way she'd begged for him, he figures Bass must have turned on the charm earlier, but then, why spill his hand like that? Shooting her friends? _Blaming_ her? Way to show her exactly how ugly they were underneath. Miles shakes his head, bemused, only to look up to find Bass watching him, the tiniest of satisfied smiles lurking around his mouth. 

And there goes his vain hope that things had just gotten out of hand, Miles thinks grimly, then salutes his rival with an exaggerated wave of his glass. Dick. He watches Bass out of the corner of his eye as they both pretend to watch Charlie fluttering around the Englishwoman's corpse. Or maybe it's only Miles pretending, because he catches the moment the President's face softens, regret and sadness warring in his eyes, before he turns back to the table to take a swig of his whiskey, mask already in place.

“The stupid, selfish thing every time, right Miles?”

They stare at each other, gauntlet thrown, as Miles slowly figures it out. Bass wants the girl alright, but he's not about to let her be his Trojan horse. He plans to take her on his own terms, free and clear. Miles had wanted to pin down an alliance, but instead, he's started their own private war.

And Charlie Matheson will be both battlefield and spoils.


	10. T'was a Maelstrom

Maggie's moonlight-coloured curls are a strange, awful pink as the blood pools around her head. Charlie's hands flutter, frantic to push away the red tide, refusing to let it take Maggie even as it flows around her, sticky on her skin as she kneels next to her friend's corpse. 

Every moment she'd spent with Maggie is pushing itself into her brain, finding the woman sitting quietly by a forest pool that first day, and dragging her out of that strange, quiet stillness to bring her back to town. Back to life, she'd confessed once, kissing Charlie on the forehead. She hadn't been able to let go of her old life, the one the Blackout had torn from her, until she met Charlie, and Danny, and Ben. (Rachel, too, she'd added quickly, but Charlie wasn't unaware of how much the two women loathed each other. She just preferred to ignore it.)

Charlie had been 14 when she'd finally figured out Maggie was a Rebel. There had always been strangers passing in and out of the little house across the road. The wounded ones were the easiest to explain, but the others, who came by in pairs and groups of three or four – who were they? How did Maggie know them?

She'd been in the pantry, looking for something to eat the day her father had pushed Maggie into the kitchen to whisper-shout his concerns.

“You can't have those people here, Maggie. We can't afford for anyone to find us. We'd miss you, but if you can't keep your Rebel friends away from our village, you'll need to leave.”

“Why's that, Ben? Who's looking for you?” Maggie had asked coolly, and Charlie was still pondering the same question when Maggie rose up on her toes to kiss her father's mouth. “You keep your secrets, and I'll keep mine, love. I'll try to be more discreet.”

Her father hadn't been discreet at all, pushing Maggie back into the wall to kiss her hungrily. Charlie had never been able to hold that against the woman, given the icy detente that existed between her parents, and was more surprised by the fact that Maggie – sweet, by-the-rules, healer Maggie – was a Rebel.

Not just a Rebel, Charlie deduces as she watches the comings and goings from Maggie's house. A Rebel leader, collecting information and coordinating campaigns and giving orders as she treated patients from far and wide for a parade of complaints, real and imagined.

She wouldn't call it blackmail, exactly, what she'd done. She'd just informed Maggie what she knew, and that it was in everyone's best interests that Charlie be trained in spycraft. Maggie had fobbed her off with codes and strategy and helping out in the surgery, until the day they had needed a scout to lead a group of refugees through the militia territory to the north of the village.

Fresh-faced, smiley Charlie would be perfect, Jonah Washington had suggested. No one knew her, she was an outstanding tracker and woodsman, and her loyalty was beyond reproach. Charlie had beamed at the praise, even as Maggie argued she wasn't ready. Sixteen, she'd stressed. Charlie was just a kid!

“Not from where I'm standing,” sexy Jonah had smirked, and Charlie had decided then and there he would be her new crush. He'd seemed so dangerous, with his huge shoulders and the way his eyes liked to travel over her body, but that was before she met her uncle, and Monroe. Charlie shudders, forcing herself to look at his shattered face, what _they_ had done to him. Two weeks before the militia arrived, she'd let him push her up against the side of Maggie's house and kiss her silly. Let his hands roam a little, touch her in places no one else had. Now Jonah just looks dead, and her mouth fills with bile at the memory of how she had begged his killer to touch her in ways Jonah had never dared.

(Her guilt won't even let her examine the fact that his killer had made her feel more, want more, with one pass of his hands than Jonah had with a dozen stolen kisses.)

Her sorrow for Jonah is a welcome distraction from the waves of grief she feels for Maggie's death. Charlie starts to keen when the guards come in to remove the bodies, and flinches when Bass tries to approach. In the end, it is Miles who guides her back to her room, oddly comforting in his heavy silence.

“Get into bed, kid. Try to sleep it off,” he says roughly, and actually looks away as she strips herself free of the black dress, a ruin of bloodstains, icecream and tears.

He hovers uncertainly as she climbs into bed, and it's not until he sits beside her that she remembers he's not the uncle she knew as a child anymore. But for the first time since they crashed into each other once more, there's nothing predatory in his eyes. He's just … sad, she realises.

“You need to be careful,” he says eventually, not really looking at her.

“Bass is pissed at me, and he might try and take it out on you. Don't do anything to ...”

He coughs, unable to finish the sentence, and even with her wits dulled by grief, Charlie's lip curls in scorn. 

She pushes herself up onto her elbow, the sheet sliding dangerously low over her naked breasts, and positively dares him to look. The red flush over his cheeks outrages her. Now he gets scruples? Now that he has delivered her to that monster and her friends are dead?

“To what, Uncle Miles? To make him think he can do anything he damn well pleases with me? To make him angry enough to – say – tie me up? Would he enjoy that as much as you did?”

He jerks as if she had slapped him, and for a minute she wishes she had done just that. Because his eyes are suddenly flat and mean, all their earlier conflict banished. He's not a man who likes being confronted with his misdeeds, Charlie realises. But she'd rather have a slimy bastard she can predict than the Jekyll and Hyde character he sometimes seemed to be.

“Doubt it, girlie. Bass likes 'em willing. Figured you knew that by now, what with that carry on at dinner. Damn good impression of a hot little slut just gagging for some big, bad cock,” he drawled. His hand wandered, then, close to where the fine linen sheet was clinging to the lower slopes of her breasts. “Anytime you want me to help you out with that, just let me know. I can kill people just as easy as your boyfriend.” 

She didn't even bother to wince, this time. As far as she was concerned, she didn't have an uncle, now. She and Miles Matheson shared nothing but a name that branded her a monster.

So she made sure her voice dripped sweet acid when she replied.

“Easier, I suspect. But the difference is that I can hate him, and still want him anyway. You? I just hate.”

*

Prompt: grief


	11. Until the agony

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This might get a bit icky for some. Warning for bloodplay. I've increased the rating for this story to E as a result, even if it is taking place in Bass' head.

His feet had led him to Charlie's room unbidden. He couldn't go in, no matter how much he wanted to grovel at her feet and scourge himself with useless explanations. Instead, he lays his forehead on the cool wood of her door, let it chase away the ache gathering behind his temples as he replays the moment he put a bullet into the forehead of a woman he couldn't help but admire, and a man so young he'd probably fallen in with the Rebels out of childish idealism.

They join the tally in his head, the short count of people dead at his own hand. There's a long count, too, those who have fallen to his militia, those who have starved because he hasn't fed them, those who fell victim to power struggles and espionage and the paranoia that comes with being head of state. But these two were different. They hadn't had to die. Not until he'd lost his head and claimed the girl for his own, leaving them both vulnerable. 

Self-knowledge prods at him, making him consider that maybe that had just been an excuse, the circumstance that allowed him to feed something darker and more selfish. He wanted to make her his in every way. Wanted to turn that horrified fascination into something that would bind them together, lock them tight, make them unbreakable. Sex wasn't enough, though he fully intended to use that. Kindness might yet play a part. But they needed to be twin souls, completely naked to each other, every bruise on their bodies and scrape on their souls exposed for the other's adoration. She needed to see him, and take him for who he was.

Bass forces himself to face it. He murdered two people as both a test and a gift for the girl he wants to make his bride. He knows better than Miles does how to handle a Matheson. Any sane, ordinary person would turn away in horror, and he'd seen her go pale, and scream just like you'd expect. Then she'd fallen to her knees next to the bodies, and wept for them. The next time she looked at him, revenge was already glittering in her eyes, and he'd wanted to pin her to the floor and take her, right there. 

His Matheson.

He has a vision of her in white, an enormous confection of a dress, or maybe something sleek and silky. It doesn't matter – he's tearing it off, desperate to get to what's underneath, layer after layer tormenting him until they are sitting in a pile of frothy material and discarded lingerie, his hands full of her breasts and her hair and his mouth worshipping her deadly beauty. She is rich on his tongue, coppery, and he gluts himself on it, chasing the taste around the petals of her sex and deep into her cavern, every pulse of her body drenching him in more, more, more. He works his way up her body leaving a trail of blood, admiring the rich red on her golden skin as he kisses her slowly, fervently, leaving her lips smeared with evidence of his depravity. Her tongue flicks out to lick them clean, and she flushes vermilion, scarlet, crimson as she registers the taste of her monthly flow, and begins to protest.

“Do you think a little blood could keep me from you?” Bass hears himself croon, and he fits himself between her legs then, plunging inside, stroking helplessly. She's moaning his name, lifting her hips to meet him by the time he has himself under control, and he slides out, merely tickling her with thick bulb of his cock as the bloody shaft is revealed to them both.

“Never be ashamed of who you are, Charlotte,” he says, and their eyes meet. Even in his daydream, the depth of emotion shocks him as they gaze at each other. Then she sits up, forcing him out of her body and back onto the pool of white. “I'm not,” she says, then crawls over him, licking her blood from his shaft with the delicacy of a cat before she lowers her mouth over him and begins to suck.

He'll never know if he got the chance to consummate his marriage, because the mental image overwhelms him even as he drowns in guilt and shame, spilling hard in his pants as he leans against her door. The coolness of the wood, his sticky underwear, the raised voices in the room beyond all register at once, just in time for him to hear the very last thing he should. 

Miles, voice vicious with hurt as he propositions her. “... I can kill people just as easy as your boyfriend.” 

And Charlie Matheson doesn't shrink away, or cry wolf, or protest. She goes on the attack. “Easier, I suspect. But the difference is that I can hate him, and still want him anyway. You? I just hate.”

Bass thrills to the ruthless in her voice, and his heart pangs a little for Miles, who never stopped loving that little girl, even as he forced himself into the shoes of the lecherous old uncle.

But mostly, he hears her admissions. She wants him, and she wants Miles gone. The idea would have stabbed him in the heart once, but there's only excitement and anticipation there now. He'll find a war for Miles to fight somewhere, and launch his own offensive right here. Maybe he'll even take her the front, once or twice, just enough to whet her bloodlust. She'd look magnificent in uniform, and he'd introduce her to the glory of the frantic, post-battle fuck, all teeth and nails and someone else's blood this time.

She hates him, he exults as he spins away from her door and strides towards his office. But she's a Matheson, even if she's yet to learn the lesson Miles has spent so many years teaching him. Hate is next to love, just as agony is next to bliss.

And want is the key to everything.

*  
prompt: unbreakable


End file.
